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Shahnawaz Alam's Blog
https://shahnawazalam.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/the-torture-of-junko-furuta/
The afternoon of November 25, 1988, Junko Furuta left Yashio-Minami High School for what turned out to be the last time. She didn’t even make it back to her home in Misato, Saitama Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Instead, the 17-year-old senior ran into a gang of 7 boys around her age. The youths overwhelmed her, and brought her to the house where two of the boy’s family lived in Ayase, Adachi, in north-central Tokyo. They made her call her parents and tell them that she was safe and that she would be staying with friends awhile.
That was the beginning of 44 days of abuse. She didn’t know her assailants. They had no grudge against her and there was nothing specific that they were after. They attacked her because they could, and because they wanted to; and they embarked on weeks of atrocities because they could, and because they wanted to.
At least four of the boys raped her repeatedly.
They beat her and tortured her.
They dropped weights on her body. They burned her with cigarettes. They stuck lit fireworks in her mouth, ears and anus and watched them explode. They shoved still-hot light bulbs in her vagina. At some point, they tore off one of her nipples with a pair of pliers.
The boys starved her—when they weren’t forcing her to eat cockroaches and drink her own urine. She was so weak near the end that it took her an hour to crawl downstairs to the bathroom.
And yet she’d almost escaped. One time she reached the telephone—but one of the boys intercepted her just in time and ended the call for help.
More than once she encountered the boy’s parents at the house. But they didn’t help her. Their excuse during the trial was that they were afraid of their violent son and his unpredictable criminal associates.
On December 1, 1989, the boys hung Junko from the ceiling and literally used her as a punching bag until her damaged internal organs made blood run from her mouth. The abuse had destroyed her bodily systems; when she tried to drink water, she immediately vomited. Then they taunted her with a candle flame, and finally doused her legs in lighter fluid and set her on fire, as punishment for trying to run away. She survived this round.
A few days later, they beat her with bamboo sticks and golf clubs. They brought the weights back out, this time using them to crush and destroy her hands after they tore off her fingernails.
By January 5, 1989, Junko had begged her captors to just kill her. They gang members had attacked her with a barbell after she lost a game of mah-jongg. Again they beat her torso until she bled from the mouth. She went into convulsions; the boys would later say that they thought she was faking the seizure. They set her on fire again, then put it out, so they could continue torturing her.
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Police arrested three young men, each 17 or 18 years old, after identifying Junko Furuta’s body, but at least 5 more perpetrators had been involved. In the end, four of the youths were indicted, two more went to reform school, and another was released on probation.
The Tokyo Public Prosecutor’s Office sought a life sentence for the leader of the gang. His lawyers successfully presented him as a remorseful young man trying to overcome a destabilizing childhood brain injury. In July, 1990, a lower court sentenced him to 17 years in prison.
The 1990 lower court gave the leader’s three accomplices relatively short terms: 3-4 years, 4-6 years, and 5-10 years.
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Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta
